Sinister Street, vol. 2

f relief at last abandoned, would obviously have preferred to go abroad at once and postpone the consideration of a fut

of beauty and comfort, of ripe dignity and peaceful solidity. The bow windows with their half-opaque glass seemed to repulse the noise and movement of the world from the tranquil interior they so sleekly guarded. The front door with its shimmering indigo surface and fanlight and dolphin-headed knocker and on either side of the steps the flambeaux-stands of wrought iron, the three-plaster medallions and the five tall windows of the fir

by the gold piece he had pressed into Michael's palm, a hansom pulled up at the house and someone, fair and angular with a military awkwardness, alighting from it, knocked at the door. Michael crossed the road quickly and asked if he were Mr. Prescott. Himself explained who he was and, opening the front door, led the way into the empty house. He was conscious, as he showed room after room to Prescott, that the visitor was somehow occupied less w

aid Michael at last, blushing as he spoke a

ldier-servant and all that, you know. Must talk sometimes. Important you should know just how your affairs stand. Suppose I'm almost what you m

people's failing

at once so that, when later they met again, the hard shyness of preliminary encounters would have been softened. Moreover, this empty house glinting

I don't want her to think she's got to endow hal

ied about mother's char

y clever people. Oh, I like them very much, but I always feel like a piece of furniture they wa

her?" Michael asked directly, and by his directn

at the word for a moment or two-"no kind of slur should be attached.... I mean, for instance, Mrs. Fane might have had to meet the sort of women, you know, well, what I mean is ... there was nothing of the sort. Saxby was a Puritan,

e all the echoes and the emptiness. Stella, who had arrived with Mrs. Fane, was rushing from window to window, trying patterns of chintz and damask and Roman satin; and all her notions of decoration that she flung up like released birds seemed to flutter for a while in a confusion of winged argument between her and Michael, while Mr. Prescott liste

id Stella later in the afternoon to

had green curtains in the

demande

o discover a reason, it

he at last very

eet Hotel, chosen by them as a convenient center from which to direct the multitudinous activities set up by the adventure of moving. Michael, however, after the first thrills of selection had died d

n walked over to Notting Hill to give Viner an account of his first term. It seemed to him more important that he had corresponded with Lonsdale and Wedderburn and Avery than that he should have sought out old friends. All that Christmas vacation he was acutely co

re room, and he enjoyed the intense silence that brooded outside the heavily curtained windows. Here in the Albany Michael was immeasurably aware of the life of London that was surging such a little distance away; but in this modish cloister he felt that the life he was aware of could never be dated, as if indeed were he to emerge into Piccadilly and behol

alking much,"

g of old plays

ssed into his hand. Michael wished that the play could be going to be acted to-night and that for half-a-sovereign he could restore to his mother that jolly evening and that old play and h

live"-Michael fancied that "alive" was substituted for something that migh

o alone?" a

But I seem to be feeling oldis

resist asking whether Prescott thought he was at all like his

anything that seemed irregular or interfered with things. He hated Radicals, for instance, and motor cars. He had much more brain than many people thought, but of

inary," Michael s

in," said Prescott in a tone of wise reminiscence. "You know, I think you're a very lucky chap," he added. "Here you are all provided for. In your firs

xample?" que

And when you're twenty-one you come into roughly seven hundred a year of your own, and ultimately you'll have at least two thousand a year. But don't be a young as

t women," said Michael.

laimed Prescott, put

sight into the gloom. Left behind was the new Michael going up to the Varsity to-morrow morning for his second term, going up with the assurance of finding delightful friends who would confirm his distaste for the circumscribed past. Only a recurrent apprehension that under the table he seemed called upon to manage a number of extra legs, or perhaps it was only a slight uncertainty as to which leg was crossed over the other at the moment, made him wonder very gently whether after all some of this easy remoteness were not due to the champagne. The figure of his host was receding farther and farther

, I mu

d along the arcade to

the step of the hansom, "I think I must

I've been very much inte

s memory some definite conversational thread that would lead him to discover w

he finall

e of a term's maturity. Even in the drizzle of a late January afternoon the city assumed in place o

endlessly outside, they talked lazily of life with a more clearly assur

, almost indeed of the circumstances of his birth, so easy did it seem to talk to Avery deep in

I should be happy living in rooms at the Albany without ever having done a very great deal.

" Avery objected, "if

est son comes to see me, Maurice, and drinks a little too much champagne and talks as fast as his father used to talk, I shall know just exac

his mind that she would not become his outlook thirty years hence. Some stern old admiral with his ha

shall be like at

d Avery. "You can't possibly settle down at the Albany as s

example?" M

rite p

nted to his bookshelves-"and all the dozens and dozens more I int

"In fact, I don't mind telling you I in

el la

tribute," Avery

w m

like the papers of the nineties. It will be more serious. It will deal with art, of course, and literature, and politics, but it

ss production," said Michael. "I should

about this paper," sa

d Michael. "That's why I won't write a l

w much it costs to reproduce a drawing. But it wo

ok as if the compositor had suddenly got angry with

editor, "and don't fall into that tireso

scott. You'll do lots of things. I think you're capable of them. But I'd rather watch. At least in my present mood I would. I'd give anything to feel I was a leader of men or whatever it is you are. But I'm not. I've got a sister whom you ought to meet. She's got all the positive energy in our family. I can't explain, Maurice, just exactly what I'm feeli

onsult Wedderburn about this

patronizing," Mi

ed up, sud

? I wond

k his advice about repro

isted Avery. "I'd better n

e. Your sensitiveness is

being disturbed by life. Michael thought how easily he might have had to reproach himself over Lily Haden. He had escaped once. There should be no more active exposure to frets and fevers. Looking back on his life, Michael came to the conclusion that henceforth books sh

The Oxford Looking-Glass that were pinned against the wall on a piece of old lemon-colored silk. He was greatly amused to find that the reconciling touch of the Muses had united Avery and We

nt me to do," protested Mic

"Oh, and by the way, Michael, I've asked Goldne

th for?" gas

hant of Venice. Great sport. Wedders is going to

as well as The Oxford Looking-

ary readings and the rehearsals certainly passed away the Lent term very well, for though Michael was not cast for a speaking part, he had the satisfaction of seeing Wedderburn and

t before the first night. "I think Miss Delacourt would have preferred to play Je

to set Lonsdale once more securely in the ranks of the amateurs. There

n attendant, and a mute

sick if I chucked the Foreign Office and went on the stage. Do you think I could act, if I had a chance? I'm perfectly sure I could act with Miss Delacourt. Don't forget you'

st Church, and he enjoyed escaping sometimes to Alan's rooms and ultimately persuading Alan to become a gondolier, an attendant and a soldier. Moreover, he met various men from other colleges, and he began to realize faintly thereby the i

Michael. "He probably w

t Lincoln," Lon

he

incoln is. Have you got a m

s of theatrical appearance came down and made speeches and told long stories about their triumphs in earlier days. Next morning the auxiliary l

that the enemy had on this occasion escaped. The Merchant of Venice with its tights and tinsel and ruffs faded out in that Lenten week of drizzling rain, when every afternoon Michael and Lonsdale and many others ran wildly alon

bitable. In deference to his mother's particular wish he had not invited anybody to stay with him, but he regrett

very white and severe, and his own bedroom pleasantly medi?val, and the dining-room very cool and green, and the drawing-room with wallpaper of brilliant Chin

ewashed," she said. "I wanted you to choose th

to fill the great room when Mi

thing in all that space except Stella's piano, looking now almost

he room," she said. "

thought of crude and amazing contrasts of barbarous reds and vivid greens and purples, with Persian rugs and a smell of joss-sticks and long low divans. Yet, even as Michael's fancy decked

three tall chairs and a mask of somebody-Beethoven perhaps-and black s

able to fling wide open the door of the studio and feel, while the power and glory of the sonata assailed him, that this great white room was larger even than the earth itself. Sitting upon a high-backed chair, Michael would watch the white walls melting like clouds in the sun, would see their surface turn to liquid light, and fancy in these clear melodies of Stella that he and she and the piano and the high-b

frightfully strong wrist

might a shepherd marvel

ness. It pleased him to feel that Carlyle and Rossetti might have walked as he was walking now during some dead April of time. Moreover, such heroes were not too far away. Their landscape was conceivable. People who had known them well were still alive. S

etween the rows of thin red houses, that after the freedom of the river Carlington Road was purely intolerable. It did not possess the narrowness that lent a mysterious intimacy. The two rows of houses did not lean over and meet one another as houses lean over, almost seeming to gossip with one another, in ancient towns. They gave rather the impression of two mutually unattractive entities propelled into contiguity by the inexorable economy of the life around. The two rows came together solely for the purpose of crowding together a number of insignificant little families whose almost humiliating submission to the tyranny of city life was expressed pathetically by the humble flaunting of their window-boxes and in their front gardens symbolically by the dingy par

uld open it that he had once lived in this very house. He passed on, however, remembering at every corner of every new street some bygone unimportant event which ha

t all, she had passed through his mind like the memory, or less even than the definite memory, like the consciousness that never is absent of beautiful days spent splendidly in the past. Sometimes during long railway journeys Michael had played with himself the game of vowing to remember an exa

consciousness of her former actuality here at the corner of Trelawney Road. It was almost as uncanny as the poem of Ulalume, and Michael found himself mur

door slammed, and a man with a pencil behind his ear ran hurriedly down the steps. Michael saw that the windows of the house were covered with the names of house-agents, that several "to let" b

g his teeth importantly. "No, sir, I

away in a hurry," sa

s,

ft no a

heap of tradesmen'

lad somehow that the momentary temptation to renew his friendship with t

n the drawing-room staring over the incarnadined

do try not to fall in love for a bit, because I shall soon have such a terrible hea

l demanded, with eyes fixed upon he

ed. "But let's go away together in t